Bay Area Newspaper Group (BANG) was able to avoid involuntary layoffs because 107 out of 1,100 employees took a recent buyout offer. The cuts affect the Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune and 14 other daily and weekly newspapers. The president of the company said he couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be more cuts. BANG executives cited a “drastic economic slump.”

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Down the coast, ex-SJ Mercury employees are taking to the blogosphere to ponder the paper’s future, if it has one. A sampling:

• Ryan Sholin offers proscriptions for the Merc on his blog. They including ending the ghettoization of bloggers and podcasters, ditching the focus on national news and switching software platforms.
• Meanwhile, more than 100 members of the San Jose Newspaper Guild’s Mercury News unit dressed in black and rallied in front of the paper to show their support for laid-off workers. Oft-quoted Guild unit president Sylvia Ulloa vowed to show management that employees are “united, not intimidated.” That works okay when the owners are making money, but that doesn’t seem to be the case these days.
• Michael Bazeley writes an early obit for the Merc. He doesn’t blame the new owners as much as some other disenfranchised ex-employees, but rather sees the Merc’s troubles as being rooted in rudderless leadership and lack of vision. When technology journalism exploded, the Merc stood still, he says. That was its big opportunity and the paper blew it. Now, he concludes, “I fear the paper will not recover.”
• Robert Butche writes not about the Merc but about the shockwaves of fear that the firing of LA Times editor James O’Shea sent through newsrooms and protests that “owners devoid of newspaper experience have been lulled into believing that a newspaper can flourish and survive by downsizing.” True ’nuff. The problem is that when the business shows declining readership, declining advertiser interest and no long-term hope of reversing those trends, an aggressive investment strategy isn’t a very palatable option, either.

Drumbeat of terrible earnings news continues

As if the newspaper industry needs any more bad news, a new survey finds that high-margin print classified ads perform dismally compared to online competition. The only exception: recruiting blue-collar workers. Quoting:

‘A survey of human resource executives revealed that print ranked the lowest when it comes time to finding good candidates. ‘Statistically and anecdotally,’ editors with Classified Intelligence wrote, ‘print advertising is an ineffective medium for recruiting candidates.’ Seventy percent of respondents said print was either ‘very ineffective’ or ‘ineffective’ up 60% from 2006. Only 14% of the 70 recruiters polled said that print was a good way to find employees. One interesting piece of information from the study: Recruiters did give print high marks for finding blue-collar candidates.”

It’s getting a little bizarre out there

Perhaps some unscrupulous publishers are taking advantage of the situation

• In the first case of its kind that we can remember, a publisher has been fined for running a journalism sweatshop. E&P reports that the Chinese Daily News has to pay $5.2 million for allegedly forcing reporters to file five stories a day and to rush between news conferences and interviews. Ad quotas were unreasonably high and production workers were forced to labor nonstop. Reporters testified that they had to work six days a week, 12 hours a day, but weren’t able to complain because of pressure and the culture of intimidation. We’ve heard that morale is bad in newsrooms pretty much everywhere, but this is extreme!

• And this would be funny if it weren’t true. The following item is reprinted in its entirety from Media Post: “Under a new Wall Street Journal policy, if a reporter writes a book based on a newspaper story, Rupert Murdoch wants a piece of the action, reports Crain’s New York. Any reporter’s book that uses research for Journal stories would qualify. In exchange a share of the book’s proceeds, the newspaper provides marketing and advertising support for the title. Most publishers do not require such a fee.”

Bright spots: some small-town papers are thriving

Not all newspapers are suffering. While the big metro dailies struggle to become more local, a host of existing local newspapers are seeing revenues and circulation grow to record levels. The secret seems to be focusing on mom-and-pop advertisers, making editors a part of the communities they serve and coming up with new ways to get the paper into the hands of everyone in the community.

E&P reports on several, including “the publisher of two paid Texas weeklies that between them don’t quite sell 5,000 copies: the Aransas Pass Progress and the Ingleside Index. The papers ended 2007 up 14% in ad revenue from 2006. ‘We are planning for a similar 2008,'” the publisher says.

Most of these papers are free, by the way, and that’s how they’re getting results for advertisers. Quoting one publisher: “I can remember for years Bill Dillard, the head of [department store] Dillard’s, would tell all of us daily newspaper publishers year after year — you have to get into more households. I don’t think he said you have to go out and get more paid subscribers.”

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Alan Mutter has expertly documented the crumbling business models of American newspapers, often finding insights in the financial reports that everyone else has missed. In this post, he focuses on the good news: there’s evidence that some small publishers are figuring out innovative new publishing models that are both profitable and popular with their readers. The one thread through all of them is that they target small audiences.

Vignettes from the field

Our RSS reader picks up occasional commentary by newspaper readers and former journalists that provide a glimpse into how the newspaper industry collapse is affecting ordinary people:

• A Bay Area book enthusiast laments the Chron’s decision to fold its stand-alone book review section into the weekly news analysis pages.
• A Twin Cities consultant lists the reasons he’s canceling his newspaper subscription. There are several. Like many readers, he simply doesn’t see much value any more. As newspapers slash costs and staff, the devaluation spiral continues. The product gets worse, which gives readers less inclination to read it.
• Mark Hamilton remarks wryly on the dubious value of incessant political polling
• Finally, the head of global public relations for Disney Parks & Resorts issues the most pessimistic forecast for the newspaper industry that we’ve heard anywhere. At about 10:20 in this podcast interview Eric Schwartzman, Disney’s Duncan Wardle states, “The printed newspaper industry has three to five years to live.” We hope his staff heard that!

Business sections feel the blow

Newspaper business sections have been hard hit by the ad downturn,

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Meanwhile, European specialty publisher Reed is going one stop further. It’s eliminating not just the business section but the whole business. Instead, it’ll double down on online media and risk analytics.

Glimmers of digital hope

The U.S. political campaign has apparently given a lift to newspaper websites, according to Media Post. Quoting: “The week ending February 23 saw visits to Web sites in Hitwise’s news and media category increase 22% compared to the same week in 2007. The upswing especially benefited Web sites for print publications, including online portals for magazines and newspapers. The New York Times Web site was the winner in the print category, taking 5% of total visits–a 50% increase in visits over last year. It was followed by People.com, with 3%, and The Washington Post, with 2%.”

Vignettes from the field

Our RSS reader picks up occasional commentary by newspaper readers and former journalists that provide a glimpse into how the newspaper industry collapse is affecting ordinary people:

• A Bay Area book enthusiast laments the Chron’s decision to fold its stand-alone book review section into the weekly news analysis pages.
• A Twin Cities consultant lists the reasons he’s canceling his newspaper subscription. There are several. Like many readers, he simply doesn’t see much value any more. As newspapers slash costs and staff, the devaluation spiral continues. The product gets worse, which gives readers less inclination to read it.
• Mark Hamilton remarks wryly on the dubious value of incessant political polling
• Finally, the head of global public relations for Disney Parks & Resorts issues the most pessimistic forecast for the newspaper industry that we’ve heard anywhere. At about 10:20 in this podcast interview Eric Schwartzman, Disney’s Duncan Wardle states, “The printed newspaper industry has three to five years to live.” We hope his staff heard that!

Business sections feel the blow

Newspaper business sections have been hard hit by the ad downturn,

---

Meanwhile, European specialty publisher Reed is going one stop further. It’s eliminating not just the business section but the whole business. Instead, it’ll double down on online media and risk analytics.

Glimmers of digital hope

The U.S. political campaign has apparently given a lift to newspaper websites, according to Media Post. Quoting: “The week ending February 23 saw visits to Web sites in Hitwise’s news and media category increase 22% compared to the same week in 2007. The upswing especially benefited Web sites for print publications, including online portals for magazines and newspapers. The New York Times Web site was the winner in the print category, taking 5% of total visits–a 50% increase in visits over last year. It was followed by People.com, with 3%, and The Washington Post, with 2%.”

The Boston Globe plays it straight in covering the news of its buyout-based staff reduction. As reported earlier, 60 jobs will be axed at the Globe and 20 at the Worcester Telegram. That’s on top of the 125 jobs cut at the papers a year ago. The amazing tidbit in this story is this line: “Globe employees who received lifetime job guarantees in the early 1990s will be given three weeks pay for each year of service, capped at two years’ pay.” Lifetime job guarantees?

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Newsday is cutting 120 jobs, or about five percent of its workforce. The cuts include about 25 editorial employees, along with 24 pressroom positions. The head of the local union is quoted in the article wondering how a paper on an island of 3 million people can have only 400,000 circulation. “That just tells me that Newsday is not putting effort into growing circulation,” he said. He should read the papers more often.

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The Los Angeles Daily News is cutting 22 people from its newsroom staff, or nearly 20% of its editorial workforce. This story got considerably less attention than layoffs at rival Los Angeles Times, but in percentage terms, the cuts are much deeper. The Times still has 850 newsroom employees. The Daily News’ editorial staff has been cut by about half from its peak level, according to a story in the LA Times. The Times’ story wraps up the recent carnage at California newspapers and laments the loss of local reporting. It quotes a local public official as saying, “I think people are losing any understanding of what local government does and how it figures in people’s lives.

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Meanwhile, graphic designer Erica Smith has created a Google Maps mashup of newspaper layoffs going back nearly a year.

There are so many cutbacks to report that we have to spread the news across two posts.

Bay Area Blues

The big news comes out of the Bay area, where some 1,300 employees at San Francisco-area newspapers were offered buyouts. The San Jose Mercury News offered packages aimed at shedding nearly 200 non-union employees and also said it would cut an unspecified number of union jobs. Bay Area News Group-East Bay, which includes the Tribune, the Times and 14 other newspapers, offered all 1,100 of its employees the chance to apply for buyouts, raising the question of what it would do if everyone took the offer. On the other hand, that might be a preferable option to staying in business. Employees have to decide by the end of this week.

MetroActive describes the somber mood in the Merc newsroom, which has lost half its staff since 2001. The story quotes the president of the San Jose Newspaper Guild says, “A whole lot [of people] have been looking for something else because they are done. This is not a company that people want to work for.” But where else are you going to go?

The AP quotes a veteran Merc business reporter saying, “We’ve been through this a number of times. You just wonder when it’s all going to end. The problem is nobody knows where the bottom of this is.” Hint: it’s still a long way down. The Merc covers its own gloomy news here.

In nearby Tracy, Calif., the Tracy Press has scaled its frequency back from five times weekly to twice weekly over the last six months and just laid off an unspecified number of staffers. The paper has a free circulation of 9,700. One of the laid-off employees commented, “I’m a victim of three things: the Internet, the real estate mess and the recession.” Management at Tracy‘s two other daily newspapers — the San Joaquin Herald and Stockton Record — have also recently announced cost-cutting measures, though this story didn’t specify what they were.

 

Venture Trims and Tells the Tale

In the spirit of true openness The Ventura County Star devotes 750 words to a layoff amounting to 2% of its staff, including perspective on its parent company’s finances and the overall health of the newspaper industry. No editors were affected in this round, however, the newspaper’s publisher ominously noted, “I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom yet…Things could get worse before they get better.”

Meanwhile, on the East Coast…

A blogger published a memo sent by Boston Globe publisher Steve Ainsley confirming layoff plans. “We are expecting a total reduction of 80 positions, with approximately 60 from the Globe and roughly 20 from the [Telegram & Gazette],” the memo said. “This reduction in staff is a difficult but necessary step toward our ongoing goals of reducing costs and finding efficiencies that allow for the long-term health of our business.” As the Silicon Valley of the east, Boston will see the ugly scenario now being played out in the Bay Area spread next to its shores. However, the whole thing will play out much more slowly there.

Can it get any worse in Philadelphia? In January, the publisher of the Inquirer spoke of “dire consequences” if costs aren’t cut at least 10%. Now Philadelphia Newspapers has laid off 68 Guild employees in the advertising, circulation, customer service, finance, marketing, and systems departments. That’s about 10% of Guild membership. It sounds like management-union relations aren’t so rosy there. Management basically tells the Guild it’s cutting expenses and that’s that. Meanwhile, Guild reps complain that they can’t get management to listen to their revenue-generating ideas. The concept of a union coming up with ideas to grow revenue sounds just a little too bizarre for this editor. What are they going to do: charge advertisers dues?

Not far away, in Allentown, the Morning Call announced an unspecified number of buyouts. No newsroom jobs will be affected, said editor Ardith Hilliard. A newsroom reorganization last month already resulted in eight lost positions, mostly through attrition.

Your obedient editor has been traveling for much of the last week, but the death watch doesn’t stop. Catching up on a few ongoing stories:

Zell Hell

Prescriptions for the Times

What do to about The New York Times? Big investors are ready to force change, the holding company strategy is tanking and Marc Andreesseen has launched a death watch.

Jeff Jarvis relates an intriguing reader comment suggesting survival strategies for the New York Times and the Boston Globe in “reverse syndication.” Basically, the Times sets itself up as the national newspaper of record and ditches the New York market. It syndicates its content to a network of locally-focused newspapers, which have sold off their expensive production and distribution assets and which are now essentially contract publishing operations working through a variety of media.

The former local newspaper publishers would now produce a portfolio of hyper-local publications in print and online and syndicate much of the content from other sources, including The New York Times. By selling off the expensive presses and delivery trucks (which wouldn’t be easy, BTW), they become more nimble and focused. The Times continues to deliver high-quality reporting at a high level. It’s a novel idea, though I’m not sure how the interest of quality journalism would be served. It seems that the Times would aggregate all the best reporting and the local companies would distribute variations of the Metro in their markets.

Meanwhile, Ken Doctor suggests that the Times should exit the local newspaper business.